The Busy Season

Autumn seems to be a busy season for me. Gathering nuts, burying them in small holes around the house, forgetting where those holes are. Flying around south and north and westerly then south again. Yup, very busy. Too busy to have had much time for more quilting projects. But I've been taking my camera with me and snapping pictures of inspirational color combinations.

I was going to begin posting those photos. But....

In all my autumnal business I have *cough* temporarily mislaid my camera. I will find it again, and when I do I will be able to download to my computer and then upload to this blog the color combinations that fall is providing. The shades of oak and evergreen, the burning bush and frothy asparagus fronds, the pokeweed berries on their bright stems....

So it's DIY color-inspirations for now. Look out your window. What colors paint your view today?

Pink Quilt

In my box of unfinished quilt tops waits this simple pinwheel. The plan is to hand quilt it myself someday, filling that large open white space with close quilting. (You know, perfect my stitch lengths with lots of practice.) I found a Celtic knotwork cross I'd love to use as the quilting template.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share it for Pink Saturday. It's pink in two ways. First, there's the pink in the printed fabric.


Secondly that pink fabric is from an early Quilt for the Cure collection. Although it doesn't flaunt its purpose with obvious pink ribbons (like some pink ribbon fabrics), Quilt for the Cure actually donates part of their proceeds to breast cancer research.

Sounds positively pink to me. Check out more pink with Beverly at How Sweet the Sound.



[Note; there's also a touch of pink in the flower seeds and seed envelopes you could win in my Giveaway. If you haven't entered yet, just scroll down to the next post to leave your comment and enter.]

Four UFOs

None of these four projects are finished.
I do try to finish things (usually), but you know how it is. Things crowd into your head and before you know it you're juggling fifteen projects. Some of which get shoved to the bottom of the pile for a long time.

Like the Christmas Quilt I started making for my mother... I just counted, SIX years ago! Wow, I really need to finish that. And, yes, those are half inch half square triangles. (24 in each block!) And, yes, that is the reason I haven't finished it yet.


This Young Man's Fancy got pulled out of the UFO box last week and I really think I might finish it this time. The color choices were inspired by that piece of lawn you see in the background.

Something I will not finish is the scarf in this next picture. That scarf hasn't been worked on since I was 17 years old (I'm not telling how old that makes it) and it is destined to be a UFO forever, but I keep it because of the story. It's the last skein I had of the first decent yarn I ever spun on my Louet spinning wheel, from the fleece of our own sheep.

Although that's probably reason enough to keep it, this is the real reason: I knit it with my eyes closed. I had this unreasonable fear that I would someday go blind and wouldn't know how to do anything anymore. So I tried to teach myself to knit with my eyes closed. Isn't that hysterical? I have to keep it.



The other, fourth and final (for this post anyway), UFO in the picture is the "Southern Comfort" one patch I've been working on on-and-off for years. I wanted to teach myself curved piecing on the machine and decided to make an ogee curved (bottle shape) charm quilt out of 1850s-1870s reproduction cotton fabrics. That one's allowed to be a UFO for a while yet, besides, it does improve my machine-done curved seams each time I pull it out.

Young Man's Fancy

Does anyone know the story behind the name of this block? I don't, that's why I ask. It is probably more prosaic than it sounds. Perhaps just a fancy pattern made for a young man. But what possibilities occur to the imagination?

I picture a quilter named Edith, about sixteen, very much in love with a young man in the village. Pouring her heart into creativity she designs and begins piecing a quilt she hopes will be their wedding quilt. But his fancy, his interest is captured by another young lady whom he marries. Poor Edith is left with a broken heart and an unfinished quilt. Years later, Edith realizes she is grateful not to have married the first young man because now she has found happiness married to an even better fellow, the true love of her life. Edith pulls the unfinished blocks from her hope chest to make a company quilt for the guest room bed. Did she name her new pattern Young Man's Fancy for the nephew who first slept under the finished quilt, or for fond memories of the young man who's roaming fancy left her available when the right fellow came along?

What do you imagine?

Fast and Fat Quarter Friendly Folk Art Baby Quilt

Here’s a quick baby quilt top to do. It’s not really Courthouse Steps or any named Log Cabin variation, but it’s based on that idea.

Layer your fat quarters as thick as you are comfortable with, I can usually manage to cut eight thick with my rotary cutter unless it’s been used on paper (I really ought to stop doing that). What width do you cut your strips? It doesn’t matter, as long as they’re all the same width. You’ll need plain (solid) strips that width too.

And then you need squares. The squares and the border are the same fabric so pick something thematic – I went with a gold leaf print here. (Autumn colours, etc.) It doesn’t matter what size the squares are either. I chose to make mine larger/wider than my strips but you could make them the same size or even make them smaller. Folk art is like that, folks.

On opposite sides of the square sew two pieces of the plain strips. Then, drawing randomly from your pile of fat quarter strips, you will sew strips along the other two sides. Back to the plain strips on the alternate sides, then random fat quarter strips again… keep going until you like the size of your block.

Now do that again, but start with the fat quarter strips on two opposite sides and then the plain strips on the other two sides, then fat quarter, then plain… until you have another block the same size as the first.

You’ll alternate these blocks when putting the quilt top together. And then you’ll put your border on it. If you’re like me, then you’ll stick it in the closet and feel guilty you’re not getting around to quilting it yet and wonder if maybe it would look good machine quilted, or tied even.

Pink Diamonds

You may have seen the PBS Nature program special on Diamonds that first aired back in 2006, or perhaps are aware of this through some other channels, but it caught my attention that there are pink (and a few red) diamonds coming from the Argyle Mines in the Australian outback. What’s really interesting about these million dollars a karat diamonds is why the diamonds are pink. No one knows why. The program was quite clear on what makes other colors (such as boron makes diamonds blue) but they said that the pink baffled everyone.

Now I will admit I know nothing of conditions below the mantle where diamonds form; and diamonds supposedly two to three million years old are from an era definitely out of my sphere of surety -- but I immediately thought of a reason for diamonds to be pink. (I’ll admit from a scientific standpoint it’s a complete cop-out.)

They were made that way. After all, some diamonds just are meant to be pink – like the ones in this strip-pieced Lonestar baby quilt. I found this pieced top in my stack of UFOs, that’s UnFinished Objects not space visitors, in my closet. I think it may be older than those Australian pink diamonds.